Eduard Lippert

Eduard Amandus Lippert (born January 8, 1844 in Hamburg ; † November 19, 1925 there ) was a Hamburg merchant, financier and politician who left a wide variety of traces in southern Africa.

Life

Lippert grew up in Hamburg and did a commercial apprenticeship there. After working for trading houses in London , New York and Hamburg for several years , he joined David Lippert & Co., founded by his father and run by his brother Ludwig , in the mid-1860s . Lippert initially worked in Hamburg and later in Port Elizabeth . After the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War , Lippert returned to Germany to take part in the war as a volunteer nurse. After the war, Lippert returned to Hamburg. The business was very respected and, for the circumstances at the time, reached the large sum of an annual turnover of 40 million marks in exports and almost the same amount for imports in South Africa.

Lippert married Maria Anna Zacharias (September 7, 1854 - June 18, 1897), a sister of Adolf Nicolaus Zacharias and Eduard Zacharias , who fell ill with cancer in 1890 and later died of it.

At the end of 1882 the company David Lippert & Co. in Cape Town made great losses and went bankrupt in January 1883. The company was dissolved the following year. Eduard Lippert took over the business in southern Africa, where he moved in 1884. Lippert took up residence in Pretoria and in the following years was mainly active in Barberton , where he was very successful in financing gold mines. In 1887 he obtained a monopoly on dynamite production from the government of the South African Republic . As a result of the intensification of mining activities in the Transvaal, this de facto import monopoly was very lucrative and accordingly very controversial. The companies united in the general cartel of German and British powder factories that entrusted Julius Scharlach with the protection of their interests worked against Lippert's monopoly . From 1893 the companies of the cartel participated in the monopoly. Lippert sold his shares in the company that held the monopoly in 1897. He returned to Hamburg in 1897, where he turned to various charitable activities. Among other things, the Hamburg observatory donated a telescope that is in operation there under the name Lippert Telescope .

Lippert Concession

Lippert played a role in the creation of Southern Rhodesia . Originally as a competitor of Cecil Rhodes , who had secured the right to mine mineral resources in the Matabele Kingdom with the Rudd Concession , Lippert had negotiated the granting of land rights through an agent with King Lobengula . Rhodes was alarmed that his rights would have been less valuable. Rhodes negotiated Charles Rudd with Lippert and they agreed on September 12, 1891 that Lippert would pass on the rights granted to him. Lippert then traveled to Lobengula himself with his wife Marie to conclude the negotiations. Lobengula signed the Lippert Concession, which included that Lippert had the right to resell land rights "in the name of the king" for annual payments. The Lippert Concessions were contractually passed on by Lippert to the British South Africa Company on February 11, 1892 .

Tomb in the Ohlsdorf cemetery

Others

From 1879 to 1883 Lippert belonged to the Hamburg citizenship , he was a member of the deputation for trade and shipping.

In honor of Lippert, the asteroid (846) Lipperta discovered by the Hamburg observatory was named after him.

In 1890, Lippert bought a farm in the Johannesburg area and built a part of the Marienhof villa , which has still been preserved. He had trees planted on the rest of the site and named the area Sachsenwald, based on the German Sachsenwald , which belonged to Otto von Bismarck . Today Saxonwold is a suburb of Johannesburg.

The grave of Marie and Eduard Lippert in the Ohlsdorf cemetery was made by the sculptor Johannes Schilling and has been described several times because of its special decoration. The grave is in grid square U 23, 21-35 / V 23, 17-25.

In 1898 , in memory of his wife, Lippert donated the Mariensruh infant home in Groß Borstel , which is now a school.

Eduard Lippert belonged to the circle of the initiators of the Bismarck Memorial Committees and was one of the major donors of planned since 1898 and finally in 1906 inaugurated Bismarck monument in the Old Elbpark above the jetties at the port of Hamburg .

literature

• Henning Albrecht: Diamonds, dynamite and diplomacy: The Lipperts. Hamburg merchants in imperial times (= patrons for science, vol. 20), Hamburg University Press 2018 <<. ISBN 978-3-943423-45-7 ( full text online )
• Directory of members of the Hamburg Parliament from 1859 to 1959 - short biographies. Compiled and edited by Franz Th. Mönckeberg, bound typewriter manuscript No. 986.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Obituary after Eduard Lippert's death: Appendix to the annual report of the Hamburg observatory in 1925. Ouelle: http://www.hs.uni-hamburg.de/DE/Oef/Stw/schorr/lippert.htm
2. ^ Obituary Ludwig Lippert: Hamburger Nachrichten July 23, 1918 No. 372, subscription edition
3. ↑ Marie Anne Lippert at woman biographies hamburg.de
4. ^ Ekkehard Böhm: Hamburg merchants in South Africa at the end of the 19th century. In: ZVHG 59, 1973, p. 46
5. ^ ^{A b} Arthur Keppel-Jones: Rhodes and Rhodesia: The White Conquest of Zimbabwe, 1884-1902 , 1983. ISBN 9780773505346 , p. 183
6. ↑ See also: In memory of Marie Lippert: Your travel letters and sketches from Matabeleland, September 21 to December 23, 1891. Fischer & Wittig, 1897.
7. ^ Texts from memorial plaques in Parktown ( memento from March 23, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) at parktownheritage.co.za (English; archive version)
8. ↑ Barbara Leisner, Heiko KL Schulze, Ellen Thormann: The Hamburg main cemetery Ohlsdorf. History and tombs. 2 volumes and an overview map 1: 4000. Hans Christians, Hamburg 1990, ISBN 3-7672-1060-6 , p. 49, cat. 269
9. ↑ Tomb Lippert (detailed illustrations) at frederiks.de
10. ↑ Source: Archive link ( Memento from August 7, 2012 in the Internet Archive )

Web links

• The sun and the merchant save the observatory , www.friedensblitz.de
• Obituary after Eduard Lippert's death , appendix to the annual report of the Hamburg observatory in 1925